Comment 14 for bug 34629

Lightbreeze, the steps to reproduce should be more specific:

1) Select some text, thus copying it to the primary copy-paste-buffer-thingy.
2) *Left* click somewhere on the document, thus clearing the selection.
3) Click mouse wheel (middle click).

Many people (myself included) like to perform step 2 before step 3 as a matter of course, because performing step 2 will place the cursor where you clicked. You can then verify that the cursor ends up exactly where you wanted to paste, before pasting. This avoids having to undo because you pasted one character off.

The problem occurs because GTK applications apparently attempt to synchronize the primary copy-paste-buffer-thingy with the *visible* selection, so that clearing the latter also clears the former. For many people, this synchronization is an unexpected and unwanted behavior, especially because it is not consistent with the behavior of most other (non-GTK) applications.